No Merit

It is not exactly an aid to convalescence to be confronted by James Purnell or Alan Milburn all over the airwaves.

Purnell was very expensively schooled and only went to Oxford (or any university, probably) in the absence of the grammar schools; that absence raises the gravest questions about the calibre, and thus the prestige, of Oxford and Cambridge. He made his political name by kicking people out of their wheelchairs and stamping on their heads. The money for wars, and to keep the City paying bonuses as if nothing had happened, has to be found from somewhere, and Purnell hit upon taking it from the poor, the old, the sick, the halt and the lame. He also used to chair Labour Friends of Israel, the peerage-selling criminal heart of the entire New Labour project. Once you know that, then his otherwise completely inexplicable rise suddenly makes sense.

As for Milburn, because there used to be hardly any social mobility, and because there is now also hardly any, people allow themselves to assume that there has always been hardly any. But there used to be an astonishing amount, particularly in the decades just after the War. And there was a reason for that. It was called grammar schools. Alan Milburn went to one (he is too old to have gone to a comprehensive). Still, don’t let that put you off them.